Homo sapiens in Arabia by 85,000 years ago

Abstract

Understanding the timing and character of Homo sapiens expansion out of Africa is critical for inferring the colonisation and admixture processes that underpin global population history. It has been argued that dispersal out of Africa had an early phase, particularly ~130-90 thousand years ago (ka), that only reached the East Mediterranean Levant, and a later phase, ~60-50 ka, that extended across the diverse environments of Eurasia to Sahul. However, recent findings from East Asia and Sahul challenge this model. Here we show that H. sapiens was in the Arabian Peninsula before 85 ka. We describe the Al Wusta-1 (AW-1) intermediate phalanx from the site of Al Wusta in the Nefud Desert, Saudi Arabia. AW-1 is the oldest directly dated fossil of our species outside Africa and the Levant. The palaeoenvironmental context of Al Wusta demonstrates that H. sapiens using Middle Palaeolithic stone tools dispersed into Arabia during a phase of increased precipitation driven by orbital forcing, in association with a primarily African fauna. A Bayesian model incorporating independent chronometric age estimates indicates a chronology for Al Wusta of ~95-86 ka, which we correlate with a humid episode in the later part of Marine Isotope Stage 5 known from various regional records. Al Wusta shows that early dispersals were more spatially and temporally extensive than previously thought. Early H. sapiens dispersals out of Africa were not limited to winter rainfall-fed Levantine Mediterranean woodlands immediately adjacent to Africa, but extended deep into the semi-arid grasslands of Arabia, facilitated by periods of enhanced monsoonal rainfall.

Aspects of human physical and behavioural evolution during the last 1 million years

“…The Palaeolithic record of Eurasia has seen an increased level of attention over the last decade. Stand out finds from the Arabian Peninsula include identifying the presence of H. sapiens by 85 ka (Groucutt et al , ) and the first stratified Acheulean site from the region (Scerri et al , ) demonstrating hominin presence from at least ~243 to 190 ka. Useful reviews include Groucutt and Petraglia (, and references therein) where it is clear that the Arabian Palaeolithic holds a rich and as yet relatively unexplored resource that will continue to deliver surprises in the field of human evolution.…”

Beachcombing and Coastal Settlement: The Long Migration from South Africa to Patagonia — The Greatest Journey Ever Made

“…During this glacial maximum, sea level was lowest and the width of the strait at Bab-el Mandab was at its narrowest, allowing for movement of a substantial population evidently never in danger of extinction. This earlier date is supported by stone tools from river beds in the Dhofar Mountains of southern Oman (Groucutt 2018) dating to more than 100,000 BP (Underwood 2011), illustrating a microlithic blade toolkit previously known only in Sudan. J. I.…”

September/October Print Issue: Hominin

“…The dominant, almost axiomatic paleoanthropological narrative holds that anatomically modern humans evolved in sub-Saharan Africa 200,000 years ago, and considers any fossil find relative to that framework. So, the Jebel Irhoud cranium from Morocco was reported as pushing back the origin of our species and making it a pan-African phenomenon (Hublin et al 2017); the Israeli and Saudi specimens were said to push back the timing of the dispersal out of Africa (Hershkovitz et al 2018;Groucutt et al 2018); and the Siberian fossils were called the oldest modern humans outside of the Middle East and Africa (Siberian Times 2018), despite older findings (and similar headlines) from China, Laos, and Indonesia in the last 10 years. In essence, the data are subservient to the narrative that an entity known as anatomically modern humans exists and has a singular origin.…”